Thursday, August 1, 2013

Social Justice and College Sports

Two weeks ago I was picking up a
car at Enterprise Rental and had to talk to the manager. I thought I recognized
him and asked his name. Sure enough, he had played defensive
end for UW nine years ago, graduated and now managed this branch complete in
white shirt and tie and spread sheet analysis. We talked awhile, and he
mentioned how scared he had been arriving at UW as a highly recruited three
star recruit-but with horrible SAT scores and miserable GPA. He spoke of how difficult and depressing the first two years had been learning to be a student and things like getting his first coat and tie and learning how to study and behave on the
road.“It was hard, really hard, but I
graduated. Now I’m on my way up in the company.” That was his summary.

By historical accident, college
sports have become an agent of social justice on college campuses. In this discussion I will narrow my discussion to issues of minority access to colleges, but could just as easily have talked about the college athletics contributions surrounding women's access and achievement. Each year
thirty to fifty young minority males who would normally not get accepted are
admitted to colleges across the country as student athletes. All the algorithms
predict that these minority males should fail. Yet six years later sixty to
eighty percent of them graduate. Each year college athletics helps minority
students who by all majors should fail in college.

Many state colleges can admit
unprepared student athletes as a normal part of their mission. College athletes
from disadvantaged backgrounds both from broken urban areas and poor barren
rural areas come from underfunded and disorganized public schools. They have neither
the social resources nor academic support to achieve the SAT/ACT scores or
fluid literacy to get into good private or flagship state colleges.

90% of minority and white students
from these class backgrounds will never graduate from college. Elite publics
and privates have trace elements of non-Asian male minority students on
campuses. The triage of American higher education requires high-standardized
scores, high grade point averages and high quality essays. These schools
traditionally have few minority males based upon the collapsed pipelines from
high schools. The end result black male students represent 2.7% of the
population at flagship state universities compared to 7% of school age
population. Minority males graduate at the lowest rate of any groups in
colleges.

Many of the black and other
minority presences on campus derive from recruiting and stocking up high
achieving minority students. These schools seldom recruit minorities from
seriously disadvantaged backgrounds get to these schools. College athletics
enters the scene in recruiting and trying to educate minority from ill prepared
backgrounds who would be consigned to the waste heap by normal admission andoutreach approaches.

The few students from these
backgrounds arrive at college struggling to master the textbooks, unused to the
workloads and behind from the first day. Without strong support they fail at
astronomical rates and have the highest non-graduation rates of any groups in
college.

Paradoxically college athletics
has figured out a way to recruit, train and graduate these students. On many of
these campuses athletes comprise very high percentage of the minority males on
that campus In addition these destined to fail students graduate at rates far
beyond anything that would be predicted by their academic profiles.

The difficulty in finding
minority male students prepared to succeed academically is well documented. What
is often ignored is that in a number of flagship state and private schools
student athletes can make up as high as twenty to thirty percent of minority
males in groups such as African American, Hispanic or Pacific Islander populations.
This far exceeds the population ratios for the student body.

This reflects the collapse of the
social and academic pipelines to these schools of prepared minority males. This
is not an ideal situation, and no one in their right minds wants minority males
investing immense amounts of effort into athletes rather than academics. Many males
do not have the support structure to build opportunities for sustained academic
success and mentoring. They find success, identity and most importantly engaged
adults in sports. They claw their way out through sports, and colleges who
accept them have the opportunity and obligation to not just train them as
athletes but as real students. Modern NCAA rules require prospective student
athletes to take a defined list of college core classes with minimum grades to
even be considered for scholarships. A desire to play college ball is linked to
getting a high school education. Colleges have an ethical obligation to invest
in them so that student athletes leave school not as ex-athletes without a
future, but as educated young men who will contribute to their own and their
society’s future.

The relatively high graduation
rates of admitted minority males who would not normally get into college or
succeed remain one of the unsung achievements and lessons of college athletics.
The average black athlete graduates at a 17 percent higher rate than black
regular students. Black student athletes still graduate at 68% rate versus 87%
rates with white athletes, but the rate has gone up considerably as the reforms
of 2003-4 start to take effect. At the
same time minority male student athletes especially in basketball still tend to
graduate at lower rates than anticipated.

Most student athletes come into
college identifying as athletes. They have excelled as athletes and received
praise and success as athletes. A very high percentage of student athletes from
disadvantaged backgrounds expect to become professional athletes. 70 percent of
the basketball players in Division II expect to become professionals when they
enroll as freshmen!

Left on their own as athletes
without significant social and academic support, these minority athletes will
fail at high rates. The much lower graduation rates at Division I championship
schools reflects the importance of economic investment in support. Student
athletes get in, but these schools do not have the resources of the will to
invest in significant academic and social support to help the young athletes
develop as students and change their identity focus. To be blunt, admitting
disadvantaged student athletes without serious investment in academic and
social support amounts to exploitation—they will predictably fail at very high
rates.

For underprepared and
disadvantaged student athletes to succeed two processes have to occur. First,
they have to come to a new understanding of themselves as students. This
requires getting the basic skills and confidence to compete in the same
classroom with well-prepared peers. Second, the students need the academic and
social support to get over the first two very hard years where they struggle
like fish out of water.

Athletics achieves this by
leveraging the student athlete’s passion to play sports just as new rules
require high school athletes to take better classes and get better grades.
Under NCAA rules the student must make progress towards degree by taking a set
of classes in percentage increments, passing the classes and finding a degree
over a three-year arc. Unless student athletes meet these rules they cannot
play. These formal rules will only really work if the coaches strongly, let me
emphasize strongly, push classroom
attendance and education. If athletes experience lost playing time or practice
time tied to academic attendances and performance, they will show up.

The first two years are critical
for support. The student athletes grapple with succeeding in alien classrooms
where the stakes and standards are higher than they have ever experienced. The
introduction to academic classes needs to occur slowly.

We need to be honest here. Most
of these athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds have failed as students.
Academic classrooms are places of anguish and failure for them. They face an
alien culture that many of their middle class students take for granted. So
most successful programs start out student athletes in prep classes to
introduce them to the demands of modern college classrooms. They take a trajectory
of classes for small successes. This slow preparation takes around two years to
acclimate student athletes into functioning as students in the practiced way
many middle class or successful working class kids take for granted.

Good academic support programs
build in strong tutoring, study tables. This takes economic investment to ensure students master basic skills and
confidence as students to compete in the classroom. If the system works, then
in their junior years student athletes begin to identify as students also, but
also begin to realize that they will not be professionals—although this confidence
can be invincible when third string corner backs still believe they will be
professionals some day.

The other huge lesson and
advantage lies in the community and structure that surround athletes. In even off-season
they work 30-40 hours a week on athletics. This surrounds them with a community
of peers and adults. The structure gives them a purpose and leverages the
purpose towards keeping the student focused when they face the chaotic, strange
and seemingly hostile academic world of major universities.

This structure and community can
be replicated for non-athlete students. Programs that succeed in educating
students from disadvantaged backgrounds do so with programs that provide
purpose, strong initial academic support and a community structure—the very
attributes that college athletes provides. The data on increasing not only
minority but also all student graduation rates builds upon community and
support structures.

The academic and social support
is not perfect and can be abused. But they help compensate for the very heavy
and required work load that the athletic scholarship burdens

All the support in the world will
not matter if coaches do not bring push connecting learning in the classroom to
desire to play. Most college coaches are teaching at college because they
believe in helping educate the student athletes as well as coaching sports and
winning. In addition the coaches and universities now have strong incentives to
push for academic progress because off potential lost scholarships and worse
lost opportunity to play in NCAA tournaments or bowl games.

I am not naive. A high percentage
of minority athletes end up in majors that look like dead ends, especially often
maligned ethnic studies. These claims often do injustice do many ethnic study programs
that have strong social science and humanities components. But it is important
to remember that most college students end up in majors that do not prepare
them for jobs. This is not the point of most social sciences and humanities;
they prepare students to read with understanding, write well and think
critically. They provide general adaptable cognitive frameworks for how to
learn and master subjects in a wide variety of settings. All students from
these backgrounds face short-term challenges in this job market.

The graduation rate of minority
male student athletes has improved for the last several years reflecting
consistently tighter and more aggressive academic reforms ranging from higher
high school requirements to mandate progress to degree to new penalties for
lower graduation rates that kept schools like Connecticut. The one spot that
continues to resist reform efforts remains men’s basketball especially at mid
major schools who use it to get tournament access. College basketball has by far
the most corrupt feeder system, and the one and done mentality encourages less
high school preparation, less investment in athletes once they arrive and leads
to a culture of rampant transfers to gain playing time. Unfortunately
transferring leads to lower GPA and a much lower probability of
graduation. The roots of basketball sport
are now so compromised and so many schools have so little money for academic
support that I remain deeply pessimistic that the universities will be able to
achieve the social justice possibilities in basketball that present themselves
elsewhere.

This combination of purpose,
support and structure can provide the context for academically and economically
disadvantaged students to integrate in and succeed in quality academic
settings. This stands as a success, paradox and challenge of college sports.

About Me

I teach at the University of Washington where I served as the faculty athletic representative. I created Point of the Game as a chance to reflect upon upon the role of sport in our society. Point of the Game seeks to be a conversation about about the nature of ethics in athletics and its relation to our human condition.